Our proposals and positions

Government transparency

We want a city that openly informs and engages citizens and inspires everyone to feel the city is working for them. For City Council this means allowing public comment at meetings, moving committee meetings to venues and times accessible to more citizens, and other procedural reforms.

Economic Development

We want to build community wealth by investing in the city’s residents, local businesses which provide good jobs and are rooted in our community, and public goods which benefit everybody (such as transit, affordable housing, public broadband, renewable energy, and parks). This means focusing economic development incentives to enhance existing neighborhood assets rather than giving tax breaks to wealthy interests.

Public Safety

We want a city in which all people feel safe and respected, people get the help they need, and police officers work with the community to prevent crime. This will require not only continuing reforms of the culture and policies of the Cleveland Division of Police but the shifting of a portion of the police budget to alternative safety programs which have been proven to increase neighborhood safety while reducing dangerous interactions with armed police — programs which deploy trained, unarmed staff to handle mental health emergencies, interrupt neighborhood violence, enforce traffic laws, and resolve other social problems.

City Services

It’s important to maintain public control of essential services, such as the provision of water, sewer, waste collection, streets maintenance, parks and recreation. And it’s important to maintain good, public-sector jobs. But the city needs to do a lot more to improve the quality of its services — by reducing bureaucracy, by instituting performance measures and public accountability for all departments and city enterprises, and by involving citizens and city unions in setting priorities.

Some departments/programs need major overhauls. Cleveland Public Power, for example, should become a national leader among public power providers in helping residents and business generate clean, renewable electricity. The city needs a whole new waste reduction and recycling program. And the Building and Housing Department needs more capacity to implement the lead-safe housing program and to develop needed new programs, such as point-of-sale inspection for all residential properties and visual inspection of all rental properties every three years.

Public Education

While public education does not fall under the direct purview of City Council, there are still things Council can do to support the goal of public education: a city of literate, compassionate citizens who are able to learn continually, achieve their full potential, and participate in civic life. For instance, Council can encourage the development of schools as neighborhood centers that engage the whole community and offer wrap-around services for all children. Council can support the removal of armed police from schools and promote positive discipline policies that allow students to learn from their mistakes without excluding them from the classroom. And Council can call for expanded early childhood education and adult literacy programs, elimination of the digital divide, and reform of school funding at the state level.